Martial Student Nationalisms: Writings from the Guatemalan Anti-Communist Student Committee, 1950–54

The Committee of Anticommunist University Students (CEUA) formed around 1950 in Guatemala City as a political party for student government elections at Guatemala’s public University of San Carlos (USAC). Three students, Mario Sandoval Alarcón, Lionel Sisniega Otero, and Mario López Villatoro, who had become disaffected by what they perceived as cronyism and communism under the revolutionary presidents Juan Jose Arévalo and Jacobo Arbenz, led the group. Yet the group’s beliefs were not so different from those held by a majority of USAC students, non-communist citizens, and even the revolutionary presidents the group so despised. These shared values reflected a cautious faith in civil society and an ideological investment in national progress through individual rights, civil freedoms, personal property rights, reformed free market capitalism, and electoral democracy. But political cohesion within the Right began to fracture as global debates over individual rights and free market capitalism articulated with localized status anxiety and racial ambivalence. What was once a defense of the status quo became a transnational mélange of Catholicism and, as historian Greg Grandin has written, “martial nationalism and patriarchal allegiance.” Within this transnational mélange, the CEUA was a force whose power far exceeded its small numbers. Accordingly, CEUA students were exiled with ever-greater frequency in an effort to maintain social order. Apocalyptic, exuberant anticommunist internationalism followed the CEUA into exile in Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In June 1953, one group in Tegucigalpa began to publish a newspaper, the Boletín of the Guatemalan Committee of Anticommunist University Students in Exile (CEUAGE). Soon the Boletín was the preeminent anticommunist newspaper in the region and shaped the thinking of many hundreds of anticommunists. This presentation discusses striking images and texts from the Boletín to demonstrate how students interwove local political concerns with international issues to reveal larger fractures in post-war Liberalism worldwide.